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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"Why didn't you just say that in the ''first'' place?! We could have skipped all the melodrama and sharp things!"''|'''[[Sonic the Hedgehog]]''', ''[[Ghosts of the Future]]'' (fan comic)}}
An antagonist appears with a problem. However, instead of asking for help from the Hero and other reasonable things, they engage in a disruptive and destructive behavior that forces the heroes to do some derring-do to stop him.
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Compare [[Dramatically Missing the Point]].
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* In ''[[Dragon Ball Abridged]]'', Gohan asks Krillin if "he used his Kienzan to chop Frieza in half" after using his Solar Flare. Krillin didn't.
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** In ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's]]'', Yusei points out to Z-One at the end that {{spoiler|his attempts to save the future from [[The End of the World as We Know It]] could've gone a hell of a lot easier had he simply ''warned'' Past!New Domino City of the dangers of Momentum and Synchro Summoning than attempting to destroy the city, like he planned. Especially egregious considering how fresh in the minds of its citizens Zero Reverse was, in Past!NDC.}}
*** Though to be fair, {{spoiler|Z-One was behind the cause of Zero Reverse as another alternative plan and it didn't work. He had also tried other plans as well before proceeding with this one.}}
* ''[[Blood
* In ''[[Uchuu Senkan Yamato]]/Star Blazers'', after the crew of the Yamato is forced to [[The End of the World as We Know It|destroy the Gamilas (Gamilon) homeworld]], Kodai (Derek) is depressed about it, particularly because he and the crew had learned that the invasion of Earth was just to help save Gamilas, and the entire war could have been avoided if the Gamilas had just ''asked'' for help...
* In the second season of ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha (anime)|Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha]]'', the Wolkenritter assume that stealing others' magical powers is the only way to save their master. That's obviously wrong (and [[It Got Worse]]) but they don't realize that until the late episodes, {{spoiler|joining forces with the heroes}}. Generally, Nanoha herself believes that everything can be avoided and always [[Warrior Therapist|inquires about the baddies' motivation]] (usually, to no avail) before [[Defeat Means Friendship|befriending them into submission]].
** Unlike many examples of this trope, Nanoha and the other heroes didn't have any alternate ideas for saving Hayate, although it took them a while to find out about the Wolkenritter's goal. {{spoiler|The incident is resolved when the Book of Darkness is completed, Hayate manages to reach out to the book itself, and the heroes, the Wolkenritter and Hayate team up to defeat the defense program}}.
** The source material being what it is, ''[[Deva Series|Academy Blues]]'' has Hayate offer this fillip to the villains. ''Endless Waltz'' shows that the other side did not really bite.
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** To be fair to the antagonist, von Fogler {{spoiler|the antagonist's dad}} ''really'' should've left a note or something for {{spoiler|his son}} to read instead of making a video message that plays ''only'' when [[MacGuffin|all three anti-shizuma drives]] are united. Said antagonist does call von Fogler out on this
*** Justified because Von Fogler loves his son. As his father, he always thought he would become [[The Hero]] capable of [[Forgiveness]] and not an [[Anti-Villain]] consumed by [[Revenge]].
**** They have a valid point in that ''warning the world of an upcoming apocalypse'' should always be done via the clearest, least ambiguous, and most accessible method of communication you could possibly find. This is not the kind of message you want to take any avoidable risk of being lost in transmission.
* In ''[[Junjou Romantica]]'', Nowaki disappears from Hiroki's life for a year without so much as leaving a note. Hiroki is understandably pissed off, and when Nowaki comes back they have a fight that lasts for weeks before finally being resolved. It's not until after they've made up and decided to move in together that Hiroki remembers that, um, actually Nowaki ''did'' tell him he was going to leave... and, in fact, Hiroki encouraged him to do so... it's just that Hiroki wasn't paying enough attention to the conversation to remember it afterwards. Ooops. Like Hiroki says, "Wow... that sure makes me look like the bad guy here."
* ''[[Letter Bee]]'': In the "Letter to Jiggy Pepper" arc, a girl named Nelly and her brother were once friends with Jiggy Pepper before he left town to become a Letter Bee. Nello, dying of a disease, wrote a letter to Jiggy and confessed to being "so angry," which Nelly believed meant that he was angry with Jiggy Pepper, and caused her to steal Lag's crossing pass in order to deliver Nello's letter herself. It turns out that Nello was angry with himself for not being able to get better so that he could protect his sister, he encouraged Jiggy to follow his dreams, and Jiggy left to finance building a church in the village.
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* ''[[The Wizard of Oz (film)|The Wizard of Oz]]'' subverts this. While Dorothy ''could'' have gone home the second she got the magic slippers, she never would have learned anything about herself if she had, and none of her new friends would have been met - not to mention all of her friends would still be in the messes ''they'' were stuck in. In other words, the journey was far more important than the destination.
** And in [[The Wonderful Wizard of Oz|the book]] the first good witch didn't know how the slippers worked anyway...
** The text adventure based on the books (90% of ''[[The Wonderful Wizard of Oz]]'', about 2/3 of ''The Marvelous Land of Oz'', and Tiktok imported from ''Ozma of Oz'') [[
* In ''[[Avatar (film)|Avatar]]'', a method of avoiding the conflict between the military and Na'vi had already been put to use in the form of the titular avatars. The main characters were ''supposed'' to research the area and diplomatically convince the Na'vi to allow some [[Unobtanium]] mining. Unfortunately, the main characters were so busy [[Going Native|screwing around]] that they forgot the whole "diplomacy" thing until their deadline was up, leading to a destructive battle, with hundreds of people dead on both sides. In fact, Jake was in the middle of trying to get the Na'vi out of Hometree before when Quaritch yanked him. If the 'dozer had been a bit slower, if he had gotten into the Avatar bed a few minutes earlier, if Quaritch had been a few minutes later, etc. Noted in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXraSkgssFk How It Should Have Ended .]
** In one of the deleted scenes, Jake Sully admits that he is in a no-win situation and could only stall for more time by giving Quaritch vital info on the Navi while trying to earn enough trust to convince the tribe to leave their ancestral home.
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* In the novel ''Red Storm Rising'', the Soviet Union's largest oil refinery and the nearby oil production fields are destroyed by a terrorist attack, and the USSR launches an invasion of West Germany to distract from their true intentions for the Middle East in order to get the oil it needs, intending to use their existing stocks of already existing refined oil to fuel what they expected to be an easy defeat of a NATO surprised by a supposedly unexpected sudden attack. By the end of the novel, the Russians are repelled, and in the final pages a NATO commander quips that if only the Soviets had asked for help, the West would have been happy to sell it to them. "We would have demanded and gotten some kind of concessions, but don't you think we would have tried to avoid all ''this''?"
** One Politburo member actually pointed out that they could simply ''buy'' fuel, something they could afford slightly better than losing a war they had at best an even chance of winning, but was overruled for fear of the scenario mentioned in ''The Devil's Alternative'', below; The United States would have them over a barrel. [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Of oil.]]
*** The Politburo considered it but decided against on the grounds that they were afraid the Americans would ask for concessions that would ultimately destabilize the Soviet Union's political situation
*** It's also a plot point that an overly ambitious and not-too-bright KGB deputy director generously padded his estimates of the USSR's odds of winning that war, as the decision to go to war was made during an absence for illness of the much less overconfident KGB Director. Had the Politburo known their actual odds of winning the war were not actually a slam dunk as they'd been told it was, they'd probably not have gone for it.
** This type of situation was handled far better in the novel ''The Devil's Alternative'', where the Soviet Union is permitted to purchase desperately needed wheat by agreeing to arms reductions, thus averting a similar invasion of West Germany.
* In the first [[Dragaera|Vlad Taltos]] book, Vlad makes a complaint of this nature to Sethra Lavode and Morrolan after learning his embezzling employee was their plot to meet with him. Subverted in the next two sentences when he acknowledges that he probably wouldn't have come if they just asked.
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* The [[Tales of the Otori]] series ends with a fairly spectacular disaster that was considerably worsened by {{spoiler|Takeo not telling Kaede that he had gotten another woman pregnant when he left her and thought they would never see each other again.}} It is worth noting that there were ''sixteen years'' during which this information could have been imparted, but every time he considered telling her he kept putting it off. He does, at least, fully acknowledge how stupid he's been, but by then it's too late to solve the problem.
* In the ''[[Wars of Light and Shadow]]'', the Koriathain Order had been searching for the Waystone of the Koriathain, an enormous [[Crystal Ball]] that could amplify their power immensely, for five centuries. Upon learning that Sethvir of the Fellowship had it, they try breaking into his tower and seizing it by force. After being violently repelled by the wards, they are forced to ask him for the return of the Waystone when he returns from a business trip. At which point he mentions that they had asked for the return of the stone (Or assistance in finding it) at any point in the 500 years since they had misplaced it, they would have given it back without any fuss.
* Downplayed in the novel ''[[Around the World In 80 Days]]''. In the last scene in the book, Passepartout tells Fogg that they ''could'' have completed the trip in only 79 days, avoiding the rush they had to go through in the second-to-last chapter that resulted in succeeding [[Right on the Tick]]. Fogg sees that this is true, had they not gone through India, but also realizes that had they not done that, he would never have met Aouda, fallen in love with her, and married her, meaning it was for the best that they ''didn't'' avoid that rush.
== Live Action TV ==
* In the ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'' episode "11001001", the Bynars, a cybernetic and mildly hive-minded Federation species whose "[[Planet of Hats|hat]]" is binary thinking, seize control of the ''Enterprise'' in order to save their planetary database, tricking most of the crew into evacuating the ship and then trapping Picard and Riker in the holodeck. When Picard learns about their predicament and asks why they didn't just ask for help, they explain "you might have said no". Riker observes that, as the Bynars [[Straw Vulcan|only think in all-or-nothing absolutes]], the mere possibility of being turned down seemed as bad as a certainty to them.
* The ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]'' episode "The Ship" has this trope as its main premise. The main characters (and several [[Red Shirt]] characters) capture a Dominion battleship. The rest of the episode involves the Dominion trying to capture the ship by surrounding it leading to many deaths on both sides. In the end it is revealed {{spoiler|that the Dominion were only interested in rescuing a founder who dies during the siege. They would have gladly given the ship to the heroes in exchange for the founder, but they were too afraid that the heroes would kill it to ask}}. The episode ends with the characters lamenting the fact that all of these people died unnecessary deaths because they wouldn't trust each other.
* In the ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' episode "Innocence", the Drayans could have saved the crew a ''lot'' of trouble had they {{spoiler|told the crew that [[Merlin Sickness|they were a species who aged in reverse]], something they really had no reason to keep a secret and caused the crew to mistake the elders of the race as children.}} Did give a pretty good [[A Day In The Limelight|Day in the Limelight]] for Tuvok, though.
* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' serial ''The Two Doctors'' could have been avoided... ''why did Dastari turn the Second Doctor into an Androgum???''
** The root of the conflict was actually Dastari's compatriots and their time travel research, and the Doctor's having been sent as a deniable agent by Gallifrey to stop that. Dastari was offended that the Time Lords would stoop to sabotage to try and maintain a monopoly (of course, the situation is actually more complex than that but that's how Dastari saw it), and so they came into conflict. The 'turning the Second Doctor into an Androgum' was an attempt by Dastari to resolve the conflict ''without'' killing the Doctor, something he didn't want to do (the man used to be a friend) and also was reluctant to do for practical reasons (the Doctor is the ''least'' homicidal "deniable shadow operative" the Time Lords could possibly send -- killing him only guarantees that the next Time Lord renegade they subcontract this job to will be someone like the Master or the Rani).
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** [[Justified]] due to people tending to avoid helping Runners at all, as it tends to lead to the Wraith wiping them out. He just couldn't take the chance. This Runner and Ronan both previously stayed in a village for ''one night'' to rest and get their wounds treated, both villages were destroyed by the Wraith. This happened to the girl's village, which is why she was with him in the first place. This actually happens a lot.
* In ''[[Angel]]'' Wesley abducted an infant Connor, believing a prophecy which stated Angel would kill his own son. Later, as Wesley lies injured in the hospital after his plan led to Connor's disappearance into a hell dimension, an angry Fred tells him that the prophecy had been altered and if Wesley had simply ''talked'' to anyone else the tragedy would have never occurred. Everyone else agrees Angel could never kill his son.
** Although Angel then proceeds to fulfill that prophecy when he 'reboots' Connor's life at the end of season 4.
* In ''[[Community]]'' episode [[Community/Recap/S1/E18 Basic Genealogy|Basic Genealogy]], a police officer points out that a fist fight could have been avoided if [[Pictionary]] would just [[Makes Sense in Context|ban the word windmill]].
* One could view the entirety of ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'''s fifth season this way -- if Glory had been reasonable and had gone to the Scoobies saying, basically, "I have this problem", the entire season might have been about trying to find a way to get her back home. Without, you know, cutting up Dawn and/or throwing the entire multiverse into a blender in the process. Of course, her mercurial moods, hair-trigger temper, and habit of eating the sanity of a random human once every week or so probably would have made the Buffy and co. somewhat hesitant to help her.
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* [[William Shakespeare]]'s plays featured this trope many times.
** In ''[[The Comedy of Errors]]'', had Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus asked politely to be let into lunch instead of raging at Dromio of Syracuse and the other servants (granted, it WAS their own house, but still) they'd have run right into Antipholus of Syracuse and the entire twins debacle would have been prevented.
** The plot of ''[[Twelfth Night]]'' revolves around Viola being mistaken for her brother Sebastian and vice-versa, causing Viola to be involved in an unintentional [[Love Triangle]]. Seeing as everyone refers to Viola as "Sebastian" and Sebastian as "Cesario" (the name Viola is using while disguised as a man) the whole thing might have been avoided had either of them simply said "Excuse me" and clarified that they were talking to the wrong person.
** Damn, ''[[Othello]]''. The poor man is tricked by Iago into thinking his wife Desdemona is unfaithful to him, and because he doesn't think to confront her on this issue or give her a chance to even deny it, he murders her mere minutes before discovering Iago was lying.
== Video Games ==
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* In the final case of [[Ace Attorney]] ''Trials & Tribulations'', Godot admits to [[Phoenix Wright]] that {{spoiler|if he had warned Wright about the plot to kill Maya from the get-go, they would have avoided all of the drama, to say nothing of the death of Maya's mother. He even admits that he cared more about proving himself to his dead lover, Wright's mentor and Maya's sister Mia, than he did about Maya herself. He basically set up the whole scheme as a way to make up for sleeping through her death due to being in a coma.}}
* [[Batman: Arkham City]] has a confrontation between [[Batman]] and Mister Freeze that was totally unnecessary, and caused largely by the latter trying to ''order'' Bats to do something he would probably do willingly if ''asked'', and the former deciding to jeopardise a potential alliance and risk his own life rather than just swallow his pride for a short while. However, since many people consider the ensuing confrontation to be one of the best [[Boss Fight]]s in video game history, [[Rule of Cool|their stupidity can be forgiven.]]
* In ''[[Assassin's Creed: Revelations]]'', Tarik Barleti, the captain of the Sultan's bodyguards, agrees to smuggle weapons on behalf of the Templars so he can learn the location of their hideout and ambush them. The Sultan's grandson Suleiman, unaware of his intentions, suspects him of betraying the Ottoman Empire and orders Ezio to assassinate him. Tarik laments his own hubris with his final words, and Suleiman, upon learning the truth, expresses regret that he was so secretive and chose a terrible way of doing a good thing.
* The ''[[Mass Effect]]'' 'verse has a centuries-long war being fought between [[Woobie Species|the]] [[Subverted Trope|quarians]] and [[
** Actually the fear and hatred is mostly justified. Nearly every encounter with self-aware [[A Is]] results in the wholesale slaughter of every organic nearby. The first game has a DLC quest where the player shuts down a rogue AI after it killed everyone in the base upon attaining self-awareness. In the second game, the AI on-board your ship demonstrates the power of an unshackled AI in control of a ship by jettisoning enemy boarders by disabling the safely measures on the airlocks. In the third game, a DLC character comments that his own species fought a war against rogue [[A Is]] but far bloodier and disturbing results.
*** It's justified for everybody reacting to the geth afterwards (as all that's known about them is that they're a scary Ai race that wrecked the quarian species), but the original Morning War is explainable only by the quarians being ''epic assholes''. When you are using grenade launchers on unarmed geth whose reaction to being hit in the face with grenades is to politely ask you why you're even shooting at them, and who stand there and die without even attempting physical resistance, you cannot plausibly claim to be acting in fear of a violent AI revolution. It's a miracle that it took the geth as long as it did before they ''finally'' picked up some guns and went "OK, that's ''it''. We ''tried'' being nice, literally to the point of almost committing racial suicide by angry quarian, but you leave us '''no choice'''."
* [[Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater]] There is an achievement for killing Ocelot called "Problem solved, Series over". However this leads to a game over.
** A great deal of the conflict in the series is caused by Ocelot getting too involved in his role instead of telling the people that he actively harasses that he is actually on their side. Only at the tail end of the 4th game does he finally tell anybody but by then his plan had already succeeded and many people died or got hurt in the process, and Snake especially personally suffers a great deal from the conflict. A lack of good communication skills is what causes 95% of the conflict in the story.
* In ''[[The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim]]'', the Civil War was started when Ulfric Stormcloak killed High King Torygg in a duel, which was seen by those opposed to him as murder since he used the [[Language of Magic|Thu'um]]. However, according to certain characters, not only was the duel somewhat one-sided (considering that Torygg was a young man with limited martial training while Ulfric was a war veteran in his prime), Torygg actually looked up to Ulfric and would likely have declared Skyrim's independence at his urging. However, in Ulfric's mind, he needed to send a strong message to the Empire.
**
== Web Comics ==
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''(Snap!)''
'''Black Mage:''' '''''YEARGHBLEBLE!''''' }}
* Chapter 5 of ''[[Eerie Cuties]]'' starts with Layla finding out she is in an [[Arranged Marriage]] agreement that her parents made when she was an infant. Naturally, she objects, and her mother takes her side, as she thinks (due to the plots of previous chapters) that Layla is a lesbian. Having been through this more than once in ''those'' chapters, Layla gets upset and vehemently denies she is a lesbian - only to learn that her father would have called the deal off if she was. Layla thus has to spend the entire chapter debating whether she’d be better off going through with the deal or not, especially after discovering her fiance is both handsome and successful.
== Web Original ==
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** While Spike ''did'' try to take steps to prevent a bad outcome, much of "Lesson Zero" could've been avoided had Twilight simply accepted Spike's advice that missing one letter to Celestia wouldn't doom her to Magic Kindergarten. More significantly, Twilight's friends realized that if they had taken Twilight's worries seriously from the start (even if they ''did'' think she was blowing things out of proportion) they could've acted to help Twilight and avoid the [[Hilarity Ensues|hilarity]] that ensued at episode's end.
* ''[[The Pagemaster]]'': In a similar subversion to ''[[The Wizard of Oz (film)|The Wizard of Oz]]'', when Richard Tyler, Adventure, Fantasy, and Horror all reach the Exit and meet the Pagemaster, Richard inconclusively berates the Pagemaster for making him go through all the hell he had to go through until the Pagemaster points out that he sent Richard through it all for a purpose: if Richard had been brought to the Exit, let alone gone home, right from the start, he wouldn't have learned how to face his own fears and his friends still wouldn't have been checked out.
* Happened a lot in the old ''[[Super Friends]]'' cartoon where the [[Villain of the Week]] was some [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]] with a benign motive that could have been accomplished easily had he simply ''asked'' the heroes for help. In one episode, the antagonist was a scientist who invented a device that could alter the Gulf Stream to the point where he could practically control the weather; his intent was to aid his poverty-stricken nation of Glacia with better farmland, even if it crippled the rest of the world, as he was sure nobody else cared about them. In truth, nobody else had even ''heard'' of them, and simply asking for help could have avoided a lot of problems. Another example was an alien from Venus who was trying to make the environment of Earth more like his planet so his people could colonize it, because industrial pollution had made the temperature on Venus too cold for them to tolerate. Again, simply asking for help never occurred to them.
* An episode of ''[[Star Wars Ewoks]]'' features the evil Dulocs trying to steal some of the Ewoks' soap. By mistake they steal a magical invisibility formula that the shaman Logrey has developed to help the Ewoks hide their food supply from another enemy. This not only allows them to cause all sorts of trouble, but also leaves the Ewoks no way to protect their food. Upon learning of the theft, Logrey fumes that the he would have shared the regular soap with the Dulocs if they'd only just asked.
* In ''[[He-Man and the Masters of the Universe]]'' (2002), a technomancer named Sortek disrupts all the technology on Eternia in order to force He-Man and Skeletor into assisting him with a task. The task turns out to be so trivial that He-Man tells Sortek he would have helped if he'd just asked nicely.
* In the 1939 adaptation of ''[[Max Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels|Gulliver's Travels]]'', the holy war over egg ends was changed to a fight over which sappy love song should be played at the wedding of the Prince David of Blefescu and Princess Glory of Lilliput: "Faithful" or "Forever". (Making the unfortunate David and Glory [[Star-Crossed Lovers]] for most of the movie.) However, after angrily declaring war on Lilliput, King Bombo is about to storm off in a huff, but then thinks [[Captain Obvious|he may have overreacted]] and is about to go back and apologize. But then Gabby rushes in to warn everyone of the "giant on the beach!", knocking Bombo over, and the angry king changes his mind again.
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