Impossible Task: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|''Ask him to find me an acre of land

 

The '''Impossible Task''' is a favorite theme in myths and legends, folklore and [[Fairy Tale]]s the world over, and is [[Older Than Feudalism]]. The task might be undertaken to win a boon, or [[Engagement Challenge|a bride]], to gain land, to break a [[Curse]], [[Famed in Story|because everyone will know about it if you do it]], to prove your worth to Baba Yaga (who may agree to be your mentor if you succeed), or because your [[Evil Uncle]] wants you—the rightful heir—out of the way. Some creators try to set up one as the [[Fantastic Fragility]] flaw.

 

Related to [[No Man of Woman Born]], [[We Do the Impossible]] and [[Cutting the Knot]]. The [[Engagement Challenge]] is often an '''Impossible Task'''. The [[Snipe Hunt]] can be a comic form of it.

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* Since [[Chessmaster|Mikado]] of ''[[Hayate the Combat Butler]]'' wants others to think that there's a possibility of gaining his inheritance from the rightful inheritor, he's set up several 'Impossible Tasks' for them.

** After that, it was to steal a [[Mineral MacGuffin]] her [[Battle Butler]] carried. {{spoiler|Nagi herself destroyed the stone when it was revealed (to Hayate) that it was the connection a great spirit would be able to use to permanently inhabit the butler's first love interest}}. Now she's having to learn to live without the backing of the inheritance.

 

* ''[[Erstwhile]]'' has this in paradox form, while telling "The Farmer's Clever Daughter".

{{quote|'''King:''' Come to me, not dressed, not naked, not on a horse, not by carriage, not on the road, not off the road, and if you do, I'll marry you.}}

 

== [[Fairy Tale]]s ==

* [[Child Ballad]] #2 ("The Elfin Knight"), and its folk-processed descendant "Scarborough Fair." See page quote.

* The horde of chores heaped upon Cinderella by her [[Wicked Stepmother]] were of this nature. Not impossible in and of themselves, but all heaped together they make an insurmountable task.

{{quote|''"I have emptied a dish of lentils into the ashes for thee, if thou hast picked them out again in two hours, thou shalt go with us."''}}

* The Russian fairy tale of [[Vasilisa The Beautiful]] involves many of these. Vasilisa's [[Wicked Stepmother]] sends her to fetch fire from Baba Yaga, expecting the girl to be eaten alive. Baba Yaga instead sets her to work on tasks that include threshing a roomful of wheat, stripping 10,000 ears of corn, and picking out a wagonload of poppy seeds from black flour dust, each in a single night. With the help of her magic doll she completes all the tasks and retrieves the magic fire, and when she brings it home, its light burns her wicked stepmother and stepsisters to ashes.

* A Jewish Fairy Tale: the king told some guy to tell him the number of hairs on his head, the number of stars in the sky, and the center of the earth. The guy plucks a hair from the king's head and says "one fewer than there were before", the number of stars in the sky is equal to the number of hairs in his donkey's tail, and the center of the earth is where his donkey stamps its foot. When the king gets upset with those answers, the guy basically says "if you're so smart, then you tell me." He gets to go free.

* In ''[http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/116.htm The Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen]'' the stepmother plays a game of cards with her stepsons so she can force them on an impossible quest.

* In the Russian [[Fairy Tale]] ''Go To I Know Not Where, Bring Back I Know Not What'', the command in the title was used to get rid of a husband. (Fortunately, his wife could turn into a bird and fly off.)

* From the [[Arabian Nights]]: Aladdin gives the sultan a bunch of large jewels in exchange for the sultan's daughter's hand in marriage. The sultan tells Aladdin to bring 40 slaves carrying 40 trays all filled with those kinds of jewels and then he will consider. The sultan considers this impossible. Aladdin of course has a genie, so problem solved.

* [[wikipedia:The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter|Princess Kaguya's impossible tasks]]

* In ''[http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/038.htm The Grateful Beasts]'', Ferko is cut all the corn in a single night, gather it all into barns the next night, and summon all the wolves in the land. It stops with the wolves because, well, they're [[Big Badass Wolf|wolves]].

* The fairy tale type Kind and Unkind Girls often features this.

* [[Seen It a Million Times|Many, many]] folktales of both European and Chinese origin feature a number of brothers with improbable talents given impossible tasks for fame, fortune, the Emperor's service or the [[Standard Hero Reward|hand of a princess]]. Sometimes they resemble each other closely enough to pass for the same person capable of a wide range of miracles.

* The third classic example is from a Swedish saga, in which the full list of conditions is that the heroine cannot visit the king by foot, by horse, in a wagon, nor in a boat. She could not visit him either dressed or undressed. It could not be day or night, a month or a year, and the moon couldn't be waxing or waning. As described above, she wore a fishing-net, balanced one foot on a sledge and the other on a goat, and went at dusk. She also went on the third day of Yule, which was considered to lie outside the normal count of the year.

* [[Celtic Mythology|Prince Conn-Eda]] loses a chess game with his evil stepmother, and her geas (her binding condition on Conn-Eda that is her right after she's won) is that he go to the land of the [[The Fair Folk|fairies]] and take the [[Cool Horse|black steed]] and [[Hell Hound|supernatural dog]] of the king of the fairies, and return to her with them within a year and a day.

 

== [[Film]] ==

** Also used in the "Happy Valley" sketch on ''Monty Python's Previous Record''. To quickly get rid of any suitors who go after his daughter, King Otto sets them the task, "Tomorrow at dawn, armed only with your sword, you must climb to the highest tower in the castle, and jump out of the window." When the queen gets sick of this, he is forced to change the task to something a bit easier - going into town and buying some tobacco.

* For a modern film version, Chandler Jarrell (Eddie Murphy) in ''[[The Golden Child]]'' is given a glass of water. He is told he must retrieve an item from across a cavern without spilling one drop of the water in the glass. He somehow manages to keep the glass of water after passing through all of the obstacles until he's standing in front of the hollow holding the Ajanti Dagger. When he reaches for the dagger the fire flares up, foiling him. He drinks the water and the flames die down, allowing him to grab the dagger.

* In ''[[The Phantom Tollbooth]]'', shortly after arriving in the Mountains of Ignorance, the protagonists meet [[The Blank|a gentleman with no face]] who asks them to complete some impossible tasks: one of them is to carve a hole through a rock with a needle, one is to move a pile of sand with a pair of tweezers, and one is to empty one well into another with a dropper. After Milo uses a magic math-solving pencil he received from the Mathemagician to realize it would take thousands of years to finish the tasks, the man reveals himself to be the Terrible Trivium, one of the Demons of Ignorance and the anthropomorphic personification of wasting time.

* In ''[[Stardust (novel)|Stardust]]'' by [[Neil Gaiman]] the protagonist is challenged by a crush to bring back a fallen star from the magical land outside their town in exchange for her hand. Subverted in that she didn't actually expect him to try, much less succeed, and they didn't get married when he did.

* In ''[[The Silmarillion]]'', Beren is told to return to Doriath with a Silmaril in his hand if he's to be allowed to marry Luthien. Part just-that-[[Badass]], part [[Exact Words]]; with [[Magic Music|Luthien's help]] (and by "help" we mean she did most of it) he gets further than he could possibly have been expected to get, but he ''is'' called "Beren One-Hand" for a reason... {{spoiler|A giant wolf bites off Beren's hand and swallows it, including the Silmaril. Beren returns to Doriath anyway, pointing out that the Silmaril is in his hand (and the hand in the wolf's belly).}}

* In ''[[Magic: The Gathering|The Brothers' War]]'', the King of Argive decrees that any suitor for his daughter must move a huge boulder across the town square. Urza builds a machine to lift and transport the stone, declaring that he had moved it with his mind.

* The title story from ''The Practical Princess (and other liberated fairytales)'' features the titular princess trying to get rid of her unwanted suitor by sending him on these. (The two tasks, a fire-proof cloak and a jeweled branch, are reminiscent of those used by Kaguya-hime in the Japanese legend, and like Kaguya the princess sees through the fakes offered.)

* In [[Robert Silverberg]]'s story "Double Dare", a team of Earth engineers and a team of alien engineers are engaged in a challenge where each is to duplicate some feat of the other's technology. Both sides cheat by presenting a rigged demo of a device they can't actually build. Both teams, [[Achievements in Ignorance|not knowing that what they're trying to do is supposed to be impossible, succeed.]]

* In the story "''The King of Katoren''", [[The Chosen One|a young Stach]] is given seven tasks, each one ''imposibler'' than the last, to complete if he wants to become the titular King of Katoren. Those tasks are selected among the worst creatures, aberrations and ''illnesses'' that plague the people of the country. To make it impossible [[Up to Eleven]], the last task is to sit on a monument cursed so that only {{spoiler|the King of Katoren}} can rest on it. Needless to say, all of them are solved.

* The [[Card-Carrying Villain|Duke]] in ''[[The 13 Clocks]]'' sets impossible tasks to suitors who wish to marry his niece, the Princess Saralinda:

{{quote|"If you can slay the thorny Boar of Borythorn, she is yours," grinned a traveler. "But there is no thorny Boar of Borythorn, which makes it hard."}}

 

* From ''[[The Tenth Kingdom]]'':

{{quote|'''Tony''': What is it with you people? What kind of twisted upbringing did you have? You know, why can't you just say, 'Oh, that'll be 100 gold coins'? Why does it always have to be, 'No! Not unless you lay a magic egg, or count the hairs on that giant's ass!'?}}

 

* The labors of Hercules are a classic example.

* Psyche is given several of these tasks by a jealous Venus in the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

* There's a certain African myth... a man gave his boys the task to see who would inherit his farm. He told each boy to go out and buy objects so that he could fill a room. The first two boys tried to do it with grain and feathers (if memory serves). They failed. The third son took out a candle and match, and filled the room with light.

 

== [[Tabletop Games]] ==

* ''[[Paranoia]]'' missions tend to be this, especially after secret society goals and personal agendas are figured in. The game's stance varies from [[Failure Is the Only Option|"literally impossible"]] to "we have no idea how to succeed, but acknowledge that sufficiently devious PCs will come up with ''something''" to "the PCs ''could'' succeed by doing X and Y and Z, it's just ludicrously unlikely that they'll be lucky and virtuous enough to actually pull all that off".

 

* [[The Merchant of Venice|Shylock]]'s "pound of flesh nearest the heart" is related; in this case, it's the villain who is forced into either doing an impossible task, or giving up what is due him.

{{quote|'''Cyrano:''' Come now, bethink you!. . .The fond hope to be

Beloved, e'en by some poor graceless lady,

Is, by this nose of mine for aye bereft me;

I love the fairest - how were't otherwise? }}

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* The manual of ''[[Microsoft Flight Simulator]]'' claimed it was impossible to fly under the Golden Gate bridge. It was possible.

* In ''[[Etrian Odyssey]] III: The Drowned City'', the ninja Kirikaze is sent to complete these so that her master might earn the right to marry Princess Kaguya.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* Keith, from [[Twokinds]] is expected to bring the [[Knights Templar|High Templar Trace Legacy]] back with him so that the conditions of his exile will be revoked, more or less "You can come home if you're bringing George Bush with you for dinner."

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* In ''[[Futurama]]'', the Robot Devil challenges Leela in a violin contest, with her having to use a [[Made of Temptation|solid gold fiddle]]. Fry does point out that a solid gold fiddle "would weigh like a hundred pounds and sounds really cruddy." The Robot Devil admits to this, stated that it's "mostly for show". Leela does beat him though - over the head with the extremely heavy fiddle.

* A modern parody may be the ''[[South Park]]'' episode "The Wacky Molestation Adventure." Kyle's mom tells him he can't go to a concert unless he cleans out the garage, shovels the snow out of the driveway, and brings democracy to Cuba. Of course he succeeds at all three.

** He still doesn't get to go, being told specifically that they never expected him to be able to pull off that last one. Kyle decides this is unfair and applies some [[Cutting the Knot|lateral thinking]]: calling child services and telling them his parents molested him so they'll get arrested and he therefore won't need their permission. It works.

* Some of the Grimorum Arcanorum's spells in ''[[Gargoyles]]'' seemed to have this as spell conditions, until modern technology [[Prophecy Twist|made the impossible possible, so to speak]].

** The most obvious is the one that woke up the sleeping gargoyles: the castle had to be lifted above the clouds. Xanatos literally does that, moving it brick by brick to the top of a tall building.

* In a US Acres segment of ''[[Garfield and Friends]]'', Orson and Wade set up a restaurant that's guaranteed to serve any food you order - if they can't make it, you get free food for a month. Roy attempts to take advantage of this with several attempts at Impossible Orders... and then gets served exactly what he orders, to his own shock. He eventually wins with "an elephant foot sandwich with mustard". Even though Orson and Wade had found an elephant, it wasn't theirs to kill and put in a sandwich, so to screw with Roy, they just showed him the elephant and pretended that they were out of mustard.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Fairy Tale Tropes]]

[[Category:Older Than Feudalism]]