Stories where heroes travel to the villain's land and bring back a cure?
November 19, 2013 6:18 PM   Subscribe

I'm looking for stories (movies, books, folk tales, whatever) where somebody or something arrives from some rather mysterious realm and proceeds to wreck up our hero's land, and the hero has to travel to the realm of the unwelcome entity and bring back some way to defeat it. (It could be a special weapon, some knowledge of the previously unstoppable villain's weakness, etc.) Anybody got some examples?

Note that I only called the solution a "cure" because of the word limit on post titles, but it could indeed be a cure if the intrusive force is a terrible plague from some other land. These could be sci-fi stories, fantasy, old myths, anything. The destructive entity doesn't really have to be evil, but their presence has to be very disruptive to the status quo in our heroes' land. These could even be more realistic stories, if you can think of examples that work. (Maybe somebody has to go behind enemy lines to learn some way to end a war, for example.) Ideally I'm looking for popular stories, but more obscure stuff is OK as long as I can look up more info about it online.
posted by Ursula Hitler to Media & Arts (23 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Would The Lord of The Rings fit this? Travel to enemy's land is the only way to effect the "cure" by destroying "The Ring" there?
posted by edgeways at 6:42 PM on November 19, 2013 [2 favorites]


Does Odysseus in the underworld fit?
posted by XMLicious at 6:45 PM on November 19, 2013


orpheus travelled to hades to get his euridice back, but he screwed it up at the last second. cuchulainn travelled from ulster to connaught to retrieve the prize bull queen medb had stolen.
posted by bruce at 6:52 PM on November 19, 2013


Does the Snow Queen fit? It's my absolute favorite.
posted by Mizu at 6:52 PM on November 19, 2013


I think Space Battleship Yamato fits the bill.
posted by Tanizaki at 7:03 PM on November 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


Star Trek IV, where the crew has to travel back in time and bring some whales back to the future, because they're the only creatures that can communicate with a space probe intent on destroying Earth.
posted by bleep at 7:24 PM on November 19, 2013 [1 favorite]


Harry Potter? HP and Dumbledore have to retrace Voldemort's/Riddle's childhood to unlock the key to defeating him.
posted by pdq at 7:38 PM on November 19, 2013


And surely some time travel movies would fit this bill? That seems like a common trope: have to travel back to the past/forward to the future whence the villain came so as to preclude the evil he effects. The Terminator movies?
posted by pdq at 7:39 PM on November 19, 2013


I think this happens several times in the first two Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (it's been a while since I've read them)
posted by Gorgik at 7:41 PM on November 19, 2013 [2 favorites]


Poltergeist has something a bit like this, though it's more of an Orphean rescue than a 'cure' as such.
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 7:46 PM on November 19, 2013


Relevant tvtropes:

Orphean Rescue
To Hell And Back
Mordor
Plot Coupon, Villain Beating Artifact
Exploring The Evil Lair/Night Sea Voyage
posted by zamboni at 8:07 PM on November 19, 2013


Lev Grossman's The Magicians and The Magician King. I think they're better read spoiler-free so I won't say too much about the specifics, but the series (the third comes out next year) fits your description.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 8:13 PM on November 19, 2013


The graphic novel Broxo - a young barbarian and a fighter princess team up in the wilderness to find out what happened to the boy's clan. Part of figuring it out involves traveling into the clan's abandoned and infested former village.
posted by cadge at 8:23 PM on November 19, 2013


This comes up multiple times in Merlin, the recent BBC show about young Merlin and King Arthur. I can't name any episodes off hand but I'll see if an episode guide stirs my memory.
posted by JenMarie at 8:28 PM on November 19, 2013


The old Star Blazers anime is pretty much this.
posted by bartonlong at 8:47 PM on November 19, 2013


There's a ton of incidents like this in Arthurian legend.

Off the top of my head, in ChretiƩn's The Story of the Grail, Perceval's kingdom is cursed when he fails to recognize the Holy Grail upon encountering it, and he must return to seek it out again.

That's not the best example, but it's the one that occurred to me off the top of my head. There are definitely examples that fit more closely to what you asked.
posted by mekily at 9:11 PM on November 19, 2013


Raymond E. Feist's "Silverthorn"
posted by alchemist at 1:51 AM on November 20, 2013


I don't know, maybe Escape from New York is right ?
posted by nicolin at 3:17 AM on November 20, 2013 [1 favorite]


This is pretty much The Hero's Journey except that the villainous intrusion is generalized to a Call to Adventure. The final step in the sequence is, however, Return with the Elixir, which might be a literal elixir (cure), or knowledge. Simplified version here.
posted by zanni at 5:14 AM on November 20, 2013


The Galactus Trilogy
posted by Rash at 8:03 AM on November 20, 2013


IIRC in DS9 the war with the Founders is ended by the Federation first giving the Founders all a disease and then offering them the cure in exchange for peace.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 10:18 AM on November 20, 2013




"The Lost Gate" by Orson Scott Card is the beginning of a trilogy that fits your basic requirements. Earth and another planet are connected by gates that only "gatemages" can open. Someone has killed off gatemages because anyone who travels through a gate is instantly healed and gets much stronger. So in order to defeat the anatgonist, the protagonist is trying to find a way to open a gate, go through it, then return to earth. Only by going to the other planet and coming back can he become strong enough.
posted by tacodave at 3:48 PM on November 20, 2013


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